Seminar paper - Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-philosophicus

Wittgenstein (W) was born in Vienna in 1889, into a large and wealthy family. After being home schooled until he was 14 he attended Realshule at Linz, with contemporaries such as Adolf Hitler.

W read Russell’s Principles of mathematics, and through doing so, became acquainted with Frege, whom he eventually met, and following his advice, studied at Cambridge under Russell.

After living a solitary life in Norway, he enlisted for the Austrian artillery after the war broke out in 1914. During his time in the military, he devised a series of philosophical thoughts, which, during his imprisonment, he turned into his only philosophical book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The book was published in Germany in 1921, and shortly afterwards in England, translated into English, with an introduction by Russell.

W’s book was the start of a type of rational thinking called logical positivism, greatly thought of amongst members of the Vienna circle, which I will return to later.

Kenny, in Philosophy in the Modern World calls Tractacus “short, beautiful, and cryptic.” It is written, not so much as a philosophical argument or theory, but simply as a series of statements. It is broken up into seven, short, declarative chapters, most of which are accompanied by a large number of footnotes. Chapter one, for example, states that: “The world, is all that is the case.” This is a relatively simple idea, that can be followed easily in terms of a cursory reading, but for any kind of logic to apply to it, we have to know what is meant by “the case.” chapter one, for example, is followed by several footnotes, including:


1.1: The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11: The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12: For the totality of facts determines what is the case and whatever is not the case.

Etc.

The footnotes are used to expand each idea, attempting to explain each opening statement. But in most cases the additional footnotes require more explanation themselves, this can result in there being over 50 footnotes, as there are for chapter three, each trying to explain the assertion that “a logical picture of facts is a thought” and often requiring that when a footnote explains another, it may not explain the assertion, so much as create more questions surrounding it. For example

3.12: I call the sign with which we express a thought a propositional sign. And a proposition is a propositional sign in its projective relation to the world.

W is then forced to further explain his definition of a proposition, as without being truly defined, there can be no true logic.


3.13 A proposition, therefore, does not actually contain its sense, but does contain the possibility of expressing it (The content of a proposition means the content of a proposition that has sense.) A proposition contains the form but not the content, of its sense.

Clearly this has not fully explained what he means, and is followed by further and further explanation, resulting in the aforementioned 50 plus statements, which are then followed by further chapters designed to help explain the previous ones.

Chapter three, ends with:


3.5: A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought.

Chapter four picks up from this, and starts to explain what a thought is (A proposition with a sense). And chapter five discusses what proposition is. Chapter six moves somewhat away from the language side and begins to look at mathematics and logic as a way to explain a proposition:


6: The general form of a truth function if [p, E, N (E)]. this is the general form of a proposition

In this, P stands for all atomic propositions, E stands for any subset of propositions, and N stands for the negation of all propositions making up E.

Supposedly this says the same as a theorem produced by Henry Sheffer, that a logical sentence can be derived from a series of NAND operations concerning the totality of atomic propositions (a NAND operation being a logical operation on two logical values, which produces a value of true, if at least one of the prepositions is false)

Later in chapter six, W changes tack somewhat. Having spent most of the book attempting detailed definitions and explanations on almost everything he has discussed, he claims that there can be no proposition of ethics, as: “propositions can explain nothing that is higher.” he says that there is no way to put ethics into words, they are “transcendental” there appears to be some disagreement here as to what exactly W means by this. It is possible that logical positivists would argue against his assertion that any attempt to discuss them a meaningless endeavour. A logical positivist may argue that anything can be discussed can be defined. In “The new Wittgenstein” it is argued that W means, in a similar fashion to Kant, that if ethics are used in empirical sciences, they are destroyed. And they are also destroyed if attempted to use with synthetic, a priori judgements.

W begins to veer toward religious considerations. He talks of will, and its relation to ethics; as well as death, and what happens to the world after it: “…at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” “death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.”

It seems to me that in the final few statements of chapter six, W has given up any attempt at explaining each of his statements. It appears more as if he is simply jotting down thoughts that he cannot explain: “How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does reveal himself in the world.” By “higher” he may mean God, in which case he is saying that God does not care about anything that happens in the world. This may explain the strange way the book ends. After explaining in great detail, his version of, essentially, how to think. He says firstly that there are things that cannot be explained, and that these are “mystical.” and then, that once you fully understand what he means, you will see that it is all senseless “He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.”

He ends his book with the bizarre chapter that consists of the single line: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Perhaps he is saying that he has covered everything of importance and nothing else is worth speaking of. Or that, once recognising that everything he has said, is senseless, there is no reason to talk about it anymore.

The Vienna circle was a group that followed much from W. they had a shared attitude of philosophy that revolved around what became referred to as logical positivism. Taken from Tractatus they asserted that all knowledge should be set to a series of rules using a language of science and rational reconstruction which replaced ordinary language with much better suited equivalencies. They claimed that logic and mathematics, along with science, were the universe of meaningful judgements, and nothing else was of any relevance, ethics, aesthetics etc. The influence of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle (coming from Tractatus), has spread across the world due to eminent philosophers having dispersed as a result of the second world war. The resulting work from those of the circle has contributed to advances in language (Ayer) as well as redefining the scientific method, with the verification principle which ensured a statement could either be analytic or capable of being verified. This was later discredited with falsification, which demands that to be scientific, a hypothesis must be able to be contradicted e.g. all swans are white, can be falsified as it is possible to find a swan which is not white.

Despite the apparent insistence by W that logical positivism was a misreading of his book, it is undeniable that the effect his book has been used as a focal point for many of the great jumps in philosophy and science of the twentieth century.

WINOL bulletin 21/3/12

It was a pretty ambitious week for everyone in this bulletin. We haven’t attempted a live OB using Skype since Tom’s last term. Which is to say that no one on production had much of an idea of how to go about doing it.

Needless to say we tried to get set up as early as possible, which wasn’t helped by neither Dave nor Corin being around too help us out. We eventually found Stu in Fred Wheeler building who showed us the ropes and I’m now fairly confident we can set up a Skype call input without any assistance. We also planed on having a test run as early as possible with Lou in the field. As early as possible meant it was at about 2pm which, when we’re thinking we’ll be needing to go live with Brine at about half past wasn’t great in terms of troubleshooting.

As time went on and the Skype calls with Lou kept cutting out, it was decided that we wouldn’t risk an attempt at a live call. Instead we set up a phone line in the radio suite and captured Brine answering a couple of questions. This was then overlaid with a screen cap of Brine from a previous bulletin. The thing to learn from our first real attempt at a Skype call was that whoever is in the field needs to prepare more. If 3G won’t provide enough of a signal to keep a connection, try and find somewhere that can. This essentially comes down to prior planning, leaving a bit earlier etc. I’m not saying Lou did anything wrong with this, we were all a bit unsure of what to do and now we have a much better idea for next time.

As it was, we got the makings of a package from Lou over Youtube and pieced it together in the Newsroom, which was fine, the sound quality could have been better, but I understand there were restrictions with camera quality. This was then followed by our phone call with Brine, and then back into the studio with Chris Pines, who was to provide our balance. I think most of this has been summed up already, but to generalise: we have to better prepare our guests for what they’ll be able to do/say etc. Pines clearly thought he was going to have more time than we gave him, we could maybe have given him more but we would have to be as close as possible to the amount of time we gave Brine; otherwise we would have been imbalanced.

From a technical standpoint, this week was pretty successful, the main onscreen issue we had was a miscommunication between director and vision mixer, so we ended up with a rather put out looking Pines as we panned over to Aarran. This is fixable in post production, and was only down to the usual lack of practice. Other than that, we were lacking a credit sequence and had to stitch it on in PP, I understand that the Mac crashed as it was being made and as such wasn’t put in in time. It shouldn’t have been left that late to begin with and that’s my fault as I usually put it together, but I was distracted with OB shenanigans. I might have to delegate the credit sequence to someone else to try and avoid this happening again.

But other that the above and a couple of hiccups that occurred (vis a vis Dan's face and a drop in sound at the end) during PP; this bulletin was pretty smooth. Headlines are looking much better - there was a bit of a mix-up with what was being put into the headlines script, so next week, whoever is writing the script should check with me or Tom as to the running order. Other than that, well done everyone in the gallery and studio, and thanks to all the non-production people that continue to lend a hand, it is very much appreciated.

Only two more bulletins to go!

Power trip over.

WINOL Bulletin 14/3/12

Well, this week, was not exactly our best effort so far, I thinks that's a fair statement to make. For the first time since our practice runs we overshot the 3 oclock deadline, which, let's face it, is never going to be a good thing. Obviously it was technical trouble that was the main reason it went a little tits-up: sarah's radio mic stopped being picked up, it wasn't something we've seen before as the soundboard was still showing her levels, we just weren't hearing it. As the guest editor Tom Evans said, this could have been relatively easily fixed if we just had spares ready to go. Therefore we will from now on have spares of anything we can, ready in the studio. Whilst this was the main reason we delayed, in the spare ten minutes we had, there was an amazing amount of other problems to try and fix. Not having a credit sequence being a major one, but for the most part, we had no real practice time and as a result, we were a bit stuffed in terms of simple confidence.

I keep saying it but much of it doesn't seem to get through. I need people to take headlines much more seriously than they currently are. If headlines come in late (be it vt or script) then the entire bulletin gets delayed, as we can't start practicing until they're done. There was a little confusion on Wednesday for Hettie's as we were trying to put Stephen Fry in it and there was a bit of miscommunication. When we come to. Having the written headlines, bear in mind, if you're writing them that they have to match the pictures. Ergo, if you're writing the headlines then you have to see what the pictures are. Since we were using a picture of Stephen Fry, we had to reference that. I know that George came up with a great headline, but it didn't fit with what we were going to have on screen so we couldn't use it. It's a bitch when that happens, but you have to just deal with it and keep going.

To summarise this part: headlines are a lot more important than many of you seem to realise, they advertise the entire bulletin and the sooner we get them done, the better the quality of the overall show. Basically, get headlines done as soon as you know what you want to go in them, the rest of your package can wait. We won't need your package until at least an hour after we've gotten your headline clip so I don't want to hear that you have to do something else first. Headlines first. Package second.

The general rule for scripting is that whoever is presenting, should write it, since this can change every week, I want to remind whoever it may end up being, that we want a script for the auto cue, long before the paper script. The auto cue script cannot have the boxes and grids etc that the paper one does, as they do not work on the auto cue. It also has to be saved as a 95.doc (I think. If in doubt, ask Tom) as the auto cue laptop is a relic from a past age. This week after we'd filmed the headlines we were sat around in the studio for about 20 minutes waiting for a script, which isn't really good enough.

As a whole the packages are much better from the gallery's point of view, more and more often we're getting natsot at the start and end of them, helping greatly with vision mixing etc. So great job on that, keep it up.

After I called our 10 minute delay and we fixed our audio issue, we had another one when we started in using the wrong mic. This was again, a slight miscommunication between myself and Ali and was a result of the previous technical error. Essentially, whilst Ali was getting us a new mic, we swapped George's mic to Sarah and then didn't tell Ali afterward, George then receiving the new mic. Is resulted in understandable confusion on his part when he put up the new mic, thinking it would be Sarah's. A silly mistake, and one that can easily be avoided in future as we'll already have spares to hand.

After this we restarted and had a pretty much flawless run. The only real mistake being that the OOV on NUS strikes wasn't queued and so we just had the camera on Sarah talking. Not the end of the world really as it still looked fine. Other than that, the credits could have been better timed, but that was down to us not having much practice time, and having better things to practice when we did have some. So, technical issues aside, this week was a pretty strong performance for production. We can only work with the time we're given, and all things considered the bulletin looks pretty good and with only minor post production jiggery pokery (especially compared to the previous week's bulletin).

Good job guys, let's keep it up for the last few weeks!

Power trip over.